Writing

The vast majority of my written output appears on my blog (linked in the menu bar above). That's all non-fiction, though, except when I embark on particularly wild flights of fancy. Fiction is something I've been trying to do more recently, and this page is where it'll appear.

Recently, though, pretty much all my fiction output (except for some projects that are not seeing the light of day anywhere on the internet for quite some time) was on the late and lamented Ficlets, a site that hosted very short pieces of fiction. And when I say "very short", I'm not kidding. (I do have an account on Ficly, the replacement for Ficlets, but haven't done much on it. Once I have something worth sharing from there, I'll mirror it here!) Here's a couple of my better efforts.

Yes, They Are In Transylvania

The pipes on the large machine hissed gently as green and purple smoke began to fill the large glass chamber. Large blue sparks leapt from every shining chrome surface, earthing themselves around the apparatus with a series of loud pops.

Try to stop him, would they? No matter how many times they sent the village priest up to the castle, denouncing his “abominations against God”, they couldn’t stop him now. Even if they all came up, brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches…

He was interrupted in his thoughts by his hunchbacked servant, Lorencz. “S-sir…there are peasants at the gates…”

“Are they brandishing pitchforks and torches?”

“Y-yes, sir. And scythes.”

Reinhardt merely strode over to the wall, and placed his hand on the large, cast-iron switch.

“Lorencz…it is time.”

Dragons Don't Exist

Dragons don’t exist.

There is, of course, a fine line between fact and belief. Just because something is true doesn’t mean that anyone believes it; conversely, a great number of people believe things that are categorically not true. And that doesn’t take into account the things that may or may not be true, but which attract great debate.

“Dragons don’t exist” is not one of those things. It’s not debated; for the most part, nobody even thinks about it, because it is so blindingly obvious that dragons don’t exist. It gets filed under the mental category of “the way things are” very early in life. No-one does experiments, establishes research teams or begins scholarly arguments in the scientific journals on the subject. Dragons: Fact or Fiction? is not going to be shown on the Discovery Channel any time soon.

Go to an empty hilltop, swept by the rain and wind, and scream out to the heavens “Dragons don’t exist!”